JSON Serializing Django Models with simplejson

Question

I\'d like to use simplejson to serialize a Django model. Django\'s serializer doesn\'t support dictionaries... and simplejson doesn\'t support Django Querysets. This is quit

Answer 1

I would go with extending simplejson. Basically, you want to plug in django's serialization when the JSON encoder encounters a QuerySet. You could use something like:

from json import dumps, loads, JSONEncoder

from django.core.serializers import serialize
from django.db.models.query import QuerySet
from django.utils.functional import curry

class DjangoJSONEncoder(JSONEncoder):
    def default(self, obj):
        if isinstance(obj, QuerySet):
            # `default` must return a python serializable
            # structure, the easiest way is to load the JSON
            # string produced by `serialize` and return it
            return loads(serialize('json', obj))
        return JSONEncoder.default(self,obj)

# partial function, we can now use dumps(my_dict) instead
# of dumps(my_dict, cls=DjangoJSONEncoder)
dumps = curry(dumps, cls=DjangoJSONEncoder)

For more info on default method, have a look at simplejson documentation. Put that in a python module, then import dumps and you're good to go. But note that this function will only help you serializing QuerySet instances, not Model instances directly.

Answer 2

based on Clement's answer, I did this to get models into JSON as well.

def toJSON(obj):
   if isinstance(obj, QuerySet):
       return simplejson.dumps(obj, cls=DjangoJSONEncoder)
   if isinstance(obj, models.Model):
       #do the same as above by making it a queryset first
       set_obj = [obj]
       set_str = simplejson.dumps(simplejson.loads(serialize('json', set_obj)))
       #eliminate brackets in the beginning and the end 
       str_obj = set_str[1:len(set_str)-2]
   return str_obj

Answer 3

A really flexible way to serialize most structures in django is to use the serializer class found here